Clubs are the new galleries: Progress Bar's Juha van t’ Zelfde interviewed

Thursday 9 March 16:09

Still from Sam Rolfes' Bruxist Mirror IV
by Jo Kali 'Clubs are the new galleries’ captioned photographs from Friday’s Progress Bar. Juha van t’ Zelfde, one of it’s organizers, explains “it’s a mantra which keeps popping up”. It’s an interesting mantra to take apart, to consider what it actually means. Self-branded as ‘a political party,’ Progress Bar is a monthly club series with lineups that boast some of the most exciting and original artists of the moment. Run in collaboration with Sonic Acts, Viral Radio and Paradiso, it’s a night for 'cutting edge thinking and dancing', and usually takes place in Amsterdam Noord. While it’s deeply connected to local artists, it’s also not geographically centred: many of the artists come from communities formed online. In a sense: shared nationality gets replaced with shared mentality. Progress Bar began as something conscious of the threats facing underground club culture. For its first edition it hosted FADER’s Aimee Cliffe, who spoke about gentrification and club closures across London. Since then, talks with artists at Progress Bar have continued to reflect the relationship between the pressures facing club culture and wider socio-political issues, particularly those concerning marginalized groups; Van t’ Zelfde mentions the economics of power as one of the biggest hurdles that artists encounter (with exceptions like Skepta and Stormzy, who have become successful while avoiding big labels). To challenge this, Progress Bar actively seeks out urgent voices and sounds; urgent defined as “an expression of the now that reveals something about what is needed”. For Van t’ Zelfde that means being able to recognize something that he doesn’t know — “a paradox, not a contradiction” — tracing movements and developments as they happen, and thinking about “what happens next?” Galleries are traditionally a space for communication; a space for bodies to explore the ideas of artists. In theory Progress Bar works the same way. It creates a platform for communication; a space for people to become engaged (mentally and physically) with the ideas of others. It works on the principle that we need more than linguistic communication: “Language isn’t enough. We need emotion, visuals, sounds, physicality, and Progress Bar provides that context.” In the basement of Friday night’s Progress Bar was Bruxist Mirror IV, an interactive VR installation by designer Sam Rolfes. “I don’t see a space for myself, or my contemporaries, in conventional galleries,” explains Rolfes. There are institutions that brand themselves as “being able to push conversations forward; places you can expect something new”. But putting his art in a club space makes perfect sense to him — “it’s a better context, it blurs artistic boundaries and provides more than a social backdrop”. The performative process of his piece demands an engaged audience, and the constant flux of “hyped up bodies ready to explore” [at Friday’s event] provided the right perspective. In the same way that Bruxist Mirror IV can’t be reduced to its visual elements, Progress Bar aims to provide a setting for music to be performed and communicated in ways other than only being heard. Progress Bar doesn’t have any previous examples to go by. It chooses not to create an online network and looks to break free of the confines of traditional economics models of club nights. But, being able to organize this, Van t’ Zelfde explains, means there’s a responsibility to do it: “There’s pure personal curiosity, but also a responsibility: we have this platform and funding to support others. If people aren’t sharing these developments then they might not survive.” This shifts our understanding of support as only an economic relationship between organisations like Progress Bar and the artists that they present. Progress Bar is helping artists to feel confident and open up the creation process of their work: for some artists it’s the first time they have performed abroad, or first time they have talked in front of an audience about their work. Van t’ Zelfde says that it’s important to have a friendly relationship with the artists before agents and contracts make it more formal. His social media is a constant stream of conversations about performances; when people are free, what they want to do, suggestions of people they want to see. Progress Bar doesn’t have the mechanics of a normal club. It doesn’t limit itself by asking “what should we do”, and for example booked God Colony & Flohio twice in two months — “She has so much stage presence, her lyrics, personality, emotion in the music. It might be weird to book them twice in two months… but who cares? Let’s do it anyway,” he says. Progress Bar is significant because it’s creating an active community, and often we when talk about the communities around clubs, we refer to communities looking to disengage. Progress Bar is successful because it doesn’t have a definitive structure, it has a fluid mentality that is constantly in a state of evolving and keeping pace with the art presents. The image of a gallery is that of a white static space, which doesn’t provide the right context for many contemporary artists. Progress Bar has responded to this by not staying still, by being ‘in progress’. Most importantly, it’s an idea that’s transferable. More Progress Bars in more places means more audiences and more platforms for these urgent voices and sounds.

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